The Thing in the Swamp

As I sat in the dark in my tree stand, I kept having that feeling of being watched. Now I have hunted, camped, and grew up in the woods and am completely at home, day or night, in the darkest, deepest swamps, and I had never had this feeling. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.
When I was slithering down later that morning, I saw something out of the corner of my eye about the same time that I heard it! I heard the crash and just BARELY caught sight of something running through the palmettos parallel to me. Now I say barely because it looked like a huge, brown dog. Honestly, at first I thought it was a buffalo. It crashed through the thicket and I heard it hit water. It sounded like a herd of hogs plowing the trees!
Around two or so that afternoon, I had been sitting in the stand maybe an hour or so when I heard the faint splash of hogs across the thicket in the swamp. As it got louder, I begin getting nervous. It was so weird because I had never felt that way before. Well, what I thought was a bunch of hogs turned out to be one single critter. When it was within a hundred yards, I could hear it plain and clear. Whatever it was, it was in no hurry and stayed out of sight. I had scouted the area and I knew the water the creature was in was waist deep on me. I could hear the “splash, drip…drip…drip…splash” as it put one foot in front of the other, real slow, like it was trying to be quiet. I thought it might be another person till I thought about how deep that water was. I would never point a gun at a noise or anything I wasn’t planning to kill dead, but as that noise got louder I was looking down the barrel! I was actually shaking.
The creature eventually got to the edge of the water with about 40 yards of thicket before the open ground between us. It crashed about 10 or 15 yards and then went quiet. Deathly quiet. No frogs, no crickets, no birds, nothing. I might have imagined it, but I thought I could hear something every now and then, like it was slippin’ in on me. It was getting dark by then and to say I was shaken would be an understatement. I never saw or heard anything else that evening, but I was so put off by the sounds that I left my bag hanging on a nail in the stand. It was two days before I got the nerve up to go back after my bag, but when I returned the bag was gone and the bark of the tree had been scratched and clawed to hell! I have not been back to that swamp. I’ve told a few people about the creature, but no one believes me.